Armor shortages Vs. Shiny new toys

[Dover]

Armor shortages Vs. Shiny new toys

by Michael Moran

snip...The U.S. media currently is making a great deal of the fact that GIs put Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the spot during a visit to Kuwait. When Rummy opened the floor to questions, a soldier demanded to know why at this late date troops still have to rifle through Iraqi dumps seeking sheet metal to armor their soft-skinned Humvees. The question brought a hail of applause from the ranks, and a side-stepping obfuscation from the SecDef.

The media loves this kind of thing, and I'm glad to see the story back in the headlines. But should we not be wondering how it ever fell out? To me, the great shame of the story is that it took an American infantryman to put this question to him.

I feel justified asking this because, to the best of my knowledge, I was the first national journalist to write about the Humvee disaster back in April. The column and the accompanying coverage MSNBC Cable devoted to it sparked a flurry of stories and a Newsweek cover. 60 Minutes revisited the topic in October. By and large, though, it was dropped, particularly by cable news outlets with the air time that is needed to fully examine the problem. (They certainly spared no time for Swift Boats and George Bush’s National Guard records, remember, each with far fewer facts to justify the attention). Why?

To my mind, the main reason is that the administration has done an excellent job cowing the media when it comes to stories critical of the war effort. The general message put out by the White House and Pentagon spokesmen is that harping on things like Humvees or Abu Ghraib is not covering news, but rather supporting the opposition or – the nuclear option – being anti-American.

Is it anti-American to point out that faulty equipment and infantry tactics are killing American soldiers? The media has nothing to be proud of here, and we're letting Rumsfeld and Co. spin it all away with “war is hell” obfuscation.

Can someone not recast this debate properly? As men die in Humvees, the Pentagon has approved countless billions for the acquisition of two new classes of fighter, a missile shield that the Russians already have outflanked and a submarine construction of rather dubious value to our war against terrorism.

This is not a Bush-bashing issue, either. You can trace this back as far as the failure of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle to offer a proper replacement for the M-113 armored personnel carrier back in the early 1980s. ..cont'd

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5445086/#041209b